User blog:Capi3101/WCRPG Update for May 9, 2016
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. This past week was a rough one. In addition to having four overnight shifts, my paternal grandmother passed away late during the week last week and I went to Kansas to attend her funeral. I wasn't as close to her as I would've liked towards the end, but I will say that she had a pretty big influence on who I am as a person. I find that I don't really have the words I need to adequately describe that particular loss, and so I'll leave it at that. It was dead week at OU this past week, which (along with finals week) is usually the most productive time of the year for me in terms of work done on WCRPG. I spent my overnights largely working on sections of Elegy Chapter 2.2. Monday night was spent working on setup details of the various encounters in the chapter, with particular emphasis on the Orestes encounter. Tuesday was a long day: I wound up being awake a full 22 hours. To help me stay awake while I was helping her navigate later that evening, my wife (who is also my creative consultant) let me use the opportunity to read off the starting notes and prologue sections of Chapter 2.1, effectively catching her up on the story so far and giving me a good judgement on whether any major changes were needed to the prologue. We were both satisfied that the chapter could stand as is - she got tripped up on names and one text block where what was going on was strictly a Kilrathi cultural phenomenon - so I felt confident about beginning the translation work when I was able to return to work on Elegy on Thursday, completing eleven syntactic reviews and beginning another one that day. Tuesday morning proper was spent on the narrative of the mission prologue in Chapter 2.2, work that continued on Friday. I did nearly complete the narrative of the scene where Bloodeye meets the character of Mo. I originally intended to have Bloodeye meet Naj'bakdor as well in the same scene, but I ultimately dropped that due to the possibility of Naj'bakdor being shot down in the last encounter in Chapter 2.1 (it wouldn't make sense for him to meet a pilot after their craft had landed aboard Ni'rakh if said craft had been blown up beforehand, after all). I'd still like to have some formal introduction of the Naj'bakdor character at some point early on in the story, so I'm thinking that'll happen during the mission briefing later on in the 2.2 prologue. It occurs to me that a couple of other characters introduced during the 2.1 mission - namely Irgu and Dya'a'ji - could stand to be introduced in that scene as well; I'd already had plans for Dya'a'ji but nothing yet for Irgu. There hasn't been much change in the Plan - I plan to continue work on Chapter 2.2, filling in as much basic data I have on encounter setups and resolutions, working on the prologue and making route calculations. I also plan to work on the translation of the mission prologue in Chapter 2.1 now that work has gotten underway there. I've discovered that the 1aiway.com diagrammer - which I've been using to help determine sentence structure for the syntactic reviews - doesn't work with Windows 10, probably owing to its reliance on Silverlight. I'm hoping that situation changes sometime in the next three or four years (before Microsoft drops support for Windows 7 at any rate), as I've been unable to locate a better sentence diagramming tool and from my understanding their downloadable app is A) subscription-based despite being listed as freeware and B) just as sucky as the online tool; I sometimes have to coax it to get it to where it'll give me a result. I've also still to do any more work on the preliminary design of the Demon's Eye base; I need to get at least the basics done there. I did do some preliminary work on the internal design of the base's dormitories this past week, but nothing really has been set in stone there just yet. I'm hopeful that this next week will be more productive - I get to do five overnights in a row, with not much to do as far as actual work is concerned. Hopefully the fatigue factor will remain manageable (and hopefully I'll be able to find sufficient volumes of coffee in case it isn't). Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next update will post to the WCRPG site sometime between 11-14Z next Monday, May 16th. Y'all have a pleasant week. Category:Blog posts